The CB Insights newsletter gets a lot of email responses. Some are better than others. This was the best one ever.
Hi everyone,
With almost 300,000 newsletter subscribers, we get a lot of email replies. Most of them are quite nice. But we get a decent chunk of colorful, angry emails.
People get upset about dumb isht all the time. It cracks me up.
But tonight was a whole other level of crazy. In response to tonight’s newsletter with the subject line “I’m rich therefore I harass,” I received this.
Holy isht!
After the poor grammar, the second thing I noticed is that it was from his business email.
That’s not smart.
I looked him up on Google and saw the name belonged to a CFO at a VC firm.
That’s really not smart.
Maybe he was hacked? Maybe he was having a bad day at work and lashing out at brown people is how he copes?
I wasn’t sure, but I def wanted to connect with this guy on LinkedIn.
So I wrote him.
I bcc’d Jon, my co-founder, on the response cuz I didn’t want him to miss out on the fun. I also pinged him on IM.
Then I got a response to my follow-up.
Was this dude high? No idea.
I forwarded his response to Jon. Naturally, I was curious if his hatred extended to other groups so I asked Jon if I could inquire about that.
With Jon’s blessing, I responded to him hoping to learn more about his views.
After waiting a bit, no response 🙁
Jon and I chatted again and he tried to cheer me up since it appeared that this person only hates brownies and not Jews.
I then emailed the firm’s founders who said the emails seemed to be the result of the executive having “clicked on some kind of phishing link that caused a blast email from his account.”
We’ll never know if these racist emails were from a phishing scam or from a VC executive, but nevertheless, someone out there hates brownies. And I thought you should know.
Love,
Anand
P.S. If you too would like to send me racist emails, please sign up for the CB Insights newsletter.